Why you MUST care more than ever about file formats
Because you must. Trust me on this
Exactly eleven years ago, I put online the slides of a seminar of mine on file formats. Today, I feel the need to remind everybody that they should really be much more informed about file formats, for their own good, even if they could still live without ever touching a computer or smartphone. If anything, the topic is more important now than in 2009. This is one of the reviews I got back then:
“Historically a culture has been little more than nothing without its documents. The end of a civilization has been based usually in the destruction of its written knowledge. The speech of Mr. Fioretti shows how important for a culture is to warranty along the centuries the open interoperability of their documents and so the accurate preservation and transmission of the knowledge and customs of such civilization."
Today, even if “our files were REALLY doomed” because we use the “cloud”, nothing has changed. That is just another kind of long-term distruction of written knowledge. So please give yourself a favour, have a look at these slides, and act accordingly:
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
The more direct support I get, the more I can continue to inform for free parents, teachers, decision makers, and everybody else who should know more stuff like this. You can support me with paid subscriptions to my newsletter, donations via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.THANKS for your support!